Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism and its Proponents
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This event will be held on Zoom: Click here to access the meeting.
An online event featuring three presentations:
Narrative Ethics and Ethical Naturalism
Evgenia Mylonaki, Assistant professor of Practical Philosophy at the Philosophy Department of the University of Patras, Greece
In this talk I aim to bring in notions from Alasdair MacIntyre’s work together with notions from Philippa Foot’s work. In particular, I want to see what sense we can make of the idea of a life-cycle as itself a kind of narrative and of the phases of life as revisions of this narrative.
Connecting Animal and Rational Nature: Midgley as a Critique of Foot
Ellie Robson, Teaching Associate at Nottingham University, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the British Society for the History of Philosophy
In this talk, I will present the work of the Mary Midgley (1919-2018) as an early form of first generation Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism. Midgley provides a unique flavour of Neo-Aristotelian naturalism which forefronts the need for close empirical comparison between humans and non-human animals. I argue that Midgley’s conception of species’ natures poses a critique of Philippa Foot’s conception of ‘life forms’.
A Critique of Second-Generation of Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism
Tom Angier, Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa
In this presentation, I will lay out the main claims and arguments of second-generation, neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalists. The group I have in mind – John Hacker-Wright, Micah Lott and Parisa Moosavi – build on the work of Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson, addressing its weaknesses while also proposing theoretical fortifications of their own. I shall argue that their attempted fortifications fail to overcome the weaknesses that beset the Foot/Thompson project, and that we need to return to a more robustly metaphysical – and thus more genuinely Aristotelian – conception of ethical naturalism.
Organized in collaboration with CASEP.
